A life merely glimpsed

Monday, 19 December 2016

What would it mean to be a non-transitioning trans woman? Is
there even such a thing? The ever-thoughtful blogger, TransPhilosopher, writes:

It is not enough to
simply have an identity that
is different from one’s assigned identity – one must also have accompanying
psychological states such as desires, desires for change, for transition
through presentational, hormonal, surgical means, etc… There is no
trans-gender without transition. One “transes” one’s own gender when one
decides to self-consciously move away from one’s birth assignment.

Wherever the process ends up, it starts with a state of
mind. “If there is identity without
desire, it is passive, but desire without identity is blind,” she
concludes.

For my part, I realise I have been too much hung-up on the
desirability of ‘passing’.

In my home town there’s a trans-friendly pub which hosts
weekly get-togethers, where the gender-questioning are encouraged to talk to
the regulars. I’ve dropped in a couple of times, in male attire, but never felt
motivated to talk to the (very conspicuous) transwomen and crossdressers. Why?
Because when I looked at them I couldn’t see anything but ‘men in dresses’,
most of them burdened with the build and posture of rugby players. (I flattered
myself that my own feminine presentation would be slightly more convincing.) I struggled to identify with them. I
identified instead with the ciswomen (if such they were) as they clustered
round the bar – though even there I was conscious that I’d internalized a stereotype
of ‘femininity’ which was all about clothes and makeup and deportment and
unjustly devalued women who aren’t interested in those things but are no less
‘feminine’ for it.

When I reported back on these experiences to an online
forum, I was rightly called out. In my misplaced honesty, I thought I was
‘telling it like it is’. In fact, I was simply voicing my own unreconstructed
prejudices. What if an obsession with ‘passing’ is just a symptom of
internalised transphobia? We’ve been inculcated by the dominant culture with
the notion that you can’t call yourself a ‘woman’ unless you look and sound
convincingly like one. Add to that a persistent homophobia – once internalised
difficult to shake off, however liberal your outward views – which is wary of
any ‘female’ inflections of ‘male’ dress or gesture, and it becomes very hard
to accept others who crossdress or to go out ‘dressed’ yourself.

When I walk out of the door en femme, who am I? Am I 60? I don’t look it and I certainly don’t
dress like any 60-year-olds I know. I have a female name and wardrobe, but that’s
all. I don’t have an identity or a backstory to match. And that absence at the
centre of my crossgendered being is critical. Am I a gender illusionist
engaging in masquerade, or am I a t-woman finding her true self in the second
half of life? If the latter, I must move beyond the obsession with ‘passing’. I
must embrace a trans identity that neither denies my ‘male’ past nor lays claim
to cis-female experiences that I’ve never had nor can never expect to have. I
must unite identity and desire. I must find psychic wholeness.

Such ideas announced themselves long before middle age set
in. Jan Morris’s autobiography, Conundrum, was my starting-point. It
came out when I was a teenager and drew a fair bit of publicity since, as
‘James Morris’, she was already a well-known and respected travel writer in
Britain. Morris, who has never been a trans activist as such, regards her
transition as resolving “a dilemma neither of the body nor of the brain, but of
the spirit”, a “quest for unity”. The metaphysical interpretation appealed to a
bookish adolescent and has stayed with me ever since as a trigger for transgender
imaginings, even though, once I began crossdressing, outward appearance felt
like the best route to finding the woman within.

I’m conscious, rereading this blog, that I’ve made similarly
pious New Year resolutions in the past. I sense that this year it’s different. Time is not on my side. The psychologist CG Jung
saw two possibilities for people as they enter middle age: they either change
or they become rigid. I am assuredly in the first camp. Jung called this ‘individuation’,
essentially a process of waking up, becoming conscious and being constantly
alive to the possibility in one’s life for growth and development.

To quote TransPhilosopher again, “gender transition is
an example par excellence of
autonomy and self-actualization”. It is the perfect fit for the individuation
that we must undergo in the second half of life.

Monday, 14 November 2016

Recently I’ve been reading a book by US journalist Peggy
Orenstein. Girls & Sex, according
to the cover blurb, “paints a ground-breaking picture of today’s sexual
landscape – and reveals how girls and young women are navigating it”. It’s the
latest in a series of alarmist reports from the front line of human relations –
Pamela Paul’s Pornified and Ariel
Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs are
earlier examples – showing how we’re all going to hell in a handcart. If I had
a young daughter, I’d be troubled for what her future may hold. As it is, I respond
more to what the book tells me as a crossdreamer, someone who carries the feminine
within me and gains sexual, emotional and psychic satisfaction from cross-gender
ideas or behaviour.

The landscape Orenstein describes is certainly a frightening
one: a place where selfies morph into sexts, where teenage romance is reduced
to blow jobs and unwelcome anal penetration. The body becomes first a ‘project’,
then a ‘product’, to be endlessly transacted on social media, photographed, digitally
massaged, commented upon for good or ill. The cultural options available to her
interviewees are at once empowering and oppressive. She writes about the ideal
of ‘hotness’, which, as Levy had earlier observed, is something different from ‘attractiveness’
or ‘beauty’, a currency which infinitely replicates a commercialised, one-dimensional
vision of sexiness. If you’re Kim Kardashian, you can become a multi-millionaire
on the back of it. If you’re a bright college girl anxious to take advantage of
hard-won opportunities, it’s a minefield.

One interviewee, Camila, a college sophomore, talks
revealingly about dress. The previous day she’d worn a brand-new bustier top to
school:

“When I got dressed I was like ‘I feel super comfortable
with myself… I feel really hot and this is going to be a good day’. Then as
soon as I got to school I felt, like, automatically I wasn’t in control. People
are staring at you, looking you up and down, saying things. I started
second-guessing myself, thinking, ‘I shouldn’t have worn this shirt. It’s too
revealing, it’s too tight.’ It’s dehumanising.”

Camila is on the horns of a dilemma. She has actively chosen to present a sexualised image, as
is her sovereign right. At the same time, she has no choice: the script is written for her by others; the girls are
in competition with each other for attention; and everyone is judging her, or
so she supposes. As Orenstein puts it, “Girls [like Camila] shifted between
subject and object day by day, moment by moment, sometimes without intending
to, sometimes unsure themselves of which they were”.

I’ve said before how unlocking my female self is like going
through a second adolescence, so it’s not surprising if Camila’s dilemma feels
like my dilemma. The self-determining subject empowers: this self looks out at
the world with steady gaze. But the habit of self-objectification, by culturally
ingrained custom, saps that power: this is a self who looks at herself being
looked at.

A strange misalliance develops between postfeminist sexual
self-confidence and the accelerating power of communications technology to
reduce a woman to an observable multi-part object. The British academic
Rosalind Gill has analysed this phenomenon, discerning a move among the sisterhood
from an “external male-judging gaze to a self-policing narcissistic gaze”. This
she sees as a more pernicious form of exploitation than any that had come
before, for “not only are women objectified as they were before, but through
sexual subjectification they must also now understand their own objectification
as pleasurable and self-chosen”.* As a crossdreamer I feel peculiarly
implicated in this development. The male in me is guilty of directing his ‘male-judging
gaze’ at any ‘hot’ woman who crosses his path, even one he only sees in the
mirror; at the same time, the female in me basks in the warm glow of being the
object of my self-directed desire.

I put on a dress. It’s short, because I believe my long legs
are my best feature and it makes me feel ‘hot’ to put them on show. I walk out
of the door, and start to “second-guess myself” (in Camila’s phrase). Perhaps it’s
too short? Perhaps I’m not in control after all? The high priests of crossdreaming theory are
keen to argue that the excitement a crossdreamer experiences at the thought of
having a female body is no different from the thrill a ciswoman feels when she
puts on a sexy dress. I dispute that: I am aroused by what Nature has not given me, not by what it has. But
where there is real symmetry is in this slippage between ‘subject’ and ‘object’.
Like the young women studied by Orenstein, I am swimming in a hypersexualised
medium where, rightly or wrongly, the body is queen; somehow I must keep my
head above water.

=====

*The quotations are from her chapter ‘Supersexualize me!
Advertising and the midriff’ in Mainstreaming
Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture, ed. Feona Attwood (2009).

Saturday, 8 October 2016

Recently I've felt an increasing urge to go out in female dress.
As I wrote in an earlier post, if I were sustained by a conviction that
I'm a t-woman who is finally throwing off her disguise, this would give me
confidence. But I have no such assurance. To me the attraction, and the
satisfaction when accomplished, is more like sexual arousal. I don't mean
literal arousal – John Thomas thankfully doesn't rise up to spoil the contour
of my dress – I mean something like the activation of those pleasure centres of
the brain which are engaged by sex.

So if I’m compelled – or ‘she’ compels me – to go out, where
can I find the confidence to walk the streets, to face the crowd ‘like a
natural woman’, and shake off the suspicion that this is all just a rather
shameful act of public masturbation? That’s where reasoning from experience should
come in. It doesn’t help that, after years of socialisation as a male, I have
internalised a bunch of prejudices, all in need of rooting out, but what I have
most to fear from passers-by is unabashed transphobia. Let’s suppose the
transphobes constitute between 2% and 5% of the population – probably nearer
the lower end among the under-thirties, nearer the higher end among the
over-fifties (since young people seem more open to gender fluidity). And let’s
further suppose that only a minority of those transphobes are so bigoted that
they want to share their opinions with me. The stats suggest that, as I walk
out of an evening, my fears of what people will think and how they might
express it are probably much exaggerated.

April, a t-girl who is refreshingly open about her experiences, draws a helpful distinction between ‘arousal range’ and ‘clocking
range’. The distance at which she turns a man on is what April calls her ‘arousal
range’. The point where she is discovered not to live up to her original
promise she calls her ‘clocking range’. I flatter myself that I have a
reasonable figure when viewed from a distance but, of course, the face is a
giveaway, which is why (thus far) I only venture out at night and use big hair
as a distraction. My own ‘clocking range’ might be about 10 feet at best.

So what do people
think, the unbigoted majority, if they pass within 10 feet of me?

The answer may be, in many if not most cases: nothing at
all. We’re all wrapped up in our own concerns. We’re on the mobile phone, we’re
chatting to a friend, hurrying to an appointment. Survival, especially in towns
and cities, demands that we screen out of consciousness the dozens of strangers
who jostle past us on the Underground. To an alarming extent, we suspend
empathy; we put curiosity on hold. That’s how we get through the day. Perhaps,
when time slows down and we’ve found a seat in the carriage, we steal a look at
the passenger opposite. What queer fish is this! Dressed like a woman but built
like a rugby prop forward. A child might point and giggle. As adults we’ve been
schooled in the avoidance of rudeness and offence, so we keep our thoughts,
however ungenerous, to ourselves. This monstrosity of nature gets off at the
next stop and passes out of our lives forever. If we’d had a good book to read,
we might never have noticed her in the first place.

So much for using the past to predict the future. Now let’s
open the front door and see what that future holds…

She is drawn by the moonlight. On a clear night, when the
moon is full or near-full, it calls to her, like the female deity which
mythology has always supposed it to be. She delights to bathe in moonlight. He
had never paid much attention to the moon, but now she studies charts of the phases,
aware that if she were truly in a woman’s body, her sublunary world would be
ruled by just such monthly cycles. And even as she looks up to the heavens, she
feels grounded as never before. She starts to walk, and there’s a pleasure in
the texture of the pavement under her heels. She stretches upwards, wishing to appear
confident. She is a thing poised between heaven and earth, very nearly a
miracle…

She remembers the words of the Gershwin song: “They can’t
take that away from me”.

Thursday, 25 August 2016

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about self-acceptance. In
the previous post I described the mix of elation and fear I felt when stepping
outside the house en femme, tracing
the latter to my horror of being ‘read’ as a man in a dress rather than the
stylish woman of my dreams. When I shared these thoughts in another forum, the
response was that I was perhaps too hung up on passability; few trans women
pass under all circumstances, I was reminded; the best hope is that if you
accept yourself, others will accept you also.

Feeding my thoughts are two e-books that have come my way.
The first is the latest offering from the prolific trans philosopher and life-coach
Felix Conrad: How to Jedi Mindtrick Your Gender Dysphoria. In this book, as in his earlier writings, he makes no
secret of his obsession with Victoria’s Secret models. One of them he blames for
a painful outbreak of ‘SUMBOD’ (a Sudden Unexplained Massive Bout of Dysphoria)
when he encounters her in a YouTube video and is instantly smitten: “As is the
way with crossgender love, it was that curious beam of energy we project on the
subject of our love but then bounce back on ourselves in some opaque mix of
worship, envy and desire” (which, incidentally, is as good a description of the
crossdreamer’s angst as I’ve read in
a long while). He identifies with her but he can never be her. She has a supermodel’s body, he the body of a middle-aged
bloke. Result: “the immense high of euphoria gives way to the despair of
dysphoria”.

For Felix, as for me, ‘passing’ is everything. Some would
find his attention to the body superficial, but I share it. “A lot of people
with gender dysphoria endlessly debate whether they should transition”, he
writes, “but don’t understand that transitioning will not cure their gender
dysphoria unless they pass”. He recognises that there are individuals whose
sense of misembodiment is so strong that it sustains them through the
transition process; when they look in the mirror after surgery they see the
woman they always knew themselves to be, even if she still has the unalterable
skeletal structure and fat distribution of a male. But he also invokes, more
controversially, the example of the “deluded transsexual who convinces
themselves – despite evidence to the contrary – that they pass”. This delusion,
he suggests, isn’t caused by vanity or narcissism but by a simple survival
instinct: they have invested so much in transition that they can’t risk the
mental consequences of facing “the harsh fact that they don’t look female at
all”.

In her book, Me! The Gift of being Transgender, Monica P Mulholland argues differently. As a trans
woman, she recognises that she could never pass for a cisgender woman: “My
hands are too big, my feet are too big, and my facial structure is wrong”. As a
result, she will “have to enter the world of the feminine by a different
route”. That route is to accept the
reality of being no less a woman but a “different kind of woman”, a
transgendered woman, to celebrate that status and to concentrate on the
achievable target of being “the best transgender woman” she can be. She urges us to think of the
transgender condition as a gift, instead of a curse. Develop the
self-confidence to avoid being ‘triggered’ by bullies, she says: “Use your
knowledge of self as a woman who is transgender to set you free from fear”.
Stop using passability as a subjective criterion; stop imagining other people’s
negative reactions every time you step outside the front door. “Self-acceptance
sets us free from our own inner critic, and may deflect the criticism of
others.”

Wise counsel from both these authors. One writes from a
post-transition perspective, the other from a non-transitioning, which makes
direct comparison difficult. Nonetheless, a revealing difference emerges in
their attitude to the body. Monica downplays the ideal of beauty in feminine
self-expression, despite (or perhaps because of) its cultural dominance: “When
we accept ourselves as transgender women, and realise that we are not failed
cisgender women, we will be free to define our own standards of attractiveness
and beauty”. Felix seems to work much more within received heteronormative
expectations. If you can’t ‘pass’ (and that matters to you), then decide firmly
against transition, as he has done; tell people that you’re gender-variant, identify
as ‘non-binary’, modify your appearance in subtle ways, but accept the body you
were born into.

Where do I fit in? I’ve come to think of myself as ‘bi-gender’
rather than ‘non-binary’, so if I was to tell the world as Felix would have me
do, it would be under that identity. Yes, perhaps my choice of term is
perpetuating the ‘gender binary’ while Felix’s is moving beyond it, but this is
how it feels to me: two selves,
sometimes bickering, sometimes embracing. Here’s a reality I must face. She wants to go out dressed as a woman; he worries she’s not passable. Who triumphs
depends on who has the upper hand at any time. Late at night, after several
glasses of red wine (he prefers white), she is emboldened, fleetingly at ease
in her borrowed body, ready to face down any opposition as she steps over the
threshold. At other times, timidity wins out. Self-acceptance (or should that be ‘selves-acceptance’?) is still a
work-in-progress, and perhaps it will only come if I contrive to move beyond
the gender binary.

Monday, 1 August 2016

In the past I’ve said that my male self (let’s call him ‘he’)
felt little desire to go out ‘dressed’. If ever I felt the urge, courage
deserted me before I got further than the front garden.

But she, it seems,
has other ideas.

So, one night last month found me walking down the road to
the post box and back, dressed. Believe me, friends, that was something else.
After initial nerves, I grew light-headed, even euphoric. Wearing wig,
underwear, LBD, mac and a new pair of low heels, with a bag slung over my
shoulder, for a few minutesI really thought I was someone else. It
was drizzling lightly; I exulted in feeling the rain on my bare legs and the
breeze wafting up my dress. The following night, I had to do it again. There
was a wind blowing: opting for a floaty minidress, I had a Marilyn Monroe
moment as the dress flew up to reveal my panties.

Emboldened, I scanned YouTube for videos on ‘How to walk
like a woman’... One foot in front of the other; practise walking down a line
in the middle of the road. This pulls one hip forward and the other back,
giving an impression of swaying hips. Shoulders straight, not swaying;
shoulders back. Relax the body but with straight posture. Lead with chest, not
with forehead. Erect, not slouching, walk tall, looking confidently ahead. Elbows
tucked into body. Swing arms from elbows, not from shoulders (but not widely)
keeping hands parallel to body not facing forwards. ‘Travel’ gracefully across
the room, don’t stomp, bringing heel down first then rolling onto the front of
the foot. (I found a lovely demonstration two minutes into this video.)

She walks differently from him, I discovered, not just
because her clothes impose different ways of moving but because she is she and
not he. Although she occupies less physical space than a man would, she fills
that space differently and interacts differently with the air around her. Is
that why on a cool night, like a starlet at a movie premiere, she can wear the
skimpiest of clothing but not ‘feel cold’?

Since that night, Going Out has become my main
preoccupation. Can I venture further than the end of the road? Can I go out earlier
in the evening? Can I go out in daytime and feel the sun on my face and legs?
I’m terrified of encountering someone, yet I know I’d be thrilled if they
walked past me with indifference.

Why do I feel such inhibition about going out? It brings a
rare pleasure. I’m not doing anything wrong (not in my book, anyway). Yet I feel like I’m fighting against a lifetime
of inculcated attitudes, the ‘what will people think?’ ethos inherited from the
parent generation.

In the last few years he has given her space to express
herself, but only in the confines of his own home. This is a restriction she
didn’t question until a month ago. She’d always accepted his explanation – that
she’d be destroyed if she went out. (I’m reminded of those awful cases in the
news of men who kidnap women off the street and keep them in basements for
eighteen years, although the comparison does him no favours!) Then some
step-change occurred. Overcome by curiosity or whatever, she simply found the
courage one night to walk out the door and into the street. And nothing bad
happened to her. Since then, that’s all she wants – to go out. Indoors, she’s
like a caged animal. Outdoors, she feels most fully alive. It may feel like
she’s escaping her imprisonment, but it never was a physical imprisonment: the
door was always unlocked; what kept her indoors was his fear on her behalf – or
her own fear, or his fear communicated to her.

How far should we permit our personae to have autonomy if
they express contrarian desires? Perhaps he was right to inhibit her? What if
his solicitude is merely that of a concerned father when he sees his teenage
daughter head out for the evening in a microdress that exposes acres of flesh?

Another time. Small hours of the morning. I drive to a local educational
institution en femme (bodycon LBD,
T-bar heels, shoulder bag – nothing else, as it was a very warm night). Walk around
the car park, then round the courtyard. Perfection. The following night I
repeat the exercise, this time upping the ante by wearing a shorter dress. A
man crosses my path without incident. Again I walk around the courtyard with
pleasure, then head back – and see the same man coming in my direction. I panic,
turn on my heel(s) and hurry back to the car park. Bad move, but an instinctive
one I must learn to master, for by my reaction I drew attention to myself. I’m
not a drag queen; the idea is to merge, to blend, ideally to pass; not to arouse attention. Who panicked in
that situation? My male self, presumably. She
wouldn’t panic, for she would have the confidence of a woman who walks down the
street in revealing clothes and is comfortable in those clothes. She’s the one
who wants to go out; she’s the one who chooses the outfit; so she’s the one
who, in ghastly modern jargon, must take ‘ownership’ of whatever situation arises.

My memory of that panicked moment is twin-layered, because his fight-or-flight response overrode her still immensely fragile
self-confidence. She and he create different memories, even though they
coexist. He is copied into her memories, so he has knowledge of what she has
done and what has happened to her. Evidence of this is when he goes back by day
to some spot where she was the previous night, like the courtyard. He remembers
her being there and any associated events, but he can’t recall the entire
experience of how it felt, because it is an ‘embodied’ memory specific to his
alter. It’s like he’s copied into the ‘email’ but not the ‘attachment’.

In a sense, this is taking things to the next level. When I
said I had no desire to go out dressed, it wasn’t just the fear talking, there were
other reasons. I was convinced I’d immediately be ‘read’ as a bloke in a dress;
and I didn’t know who ‘I’ was – a drag act or someone role-playing a fantasy.
Now, as I feel more confident on both counts, the idea of going out becomes
seductive, even obsessive. And yet it
doesn’t get any easier with repetition: the third time was just as
anxiety-inducing as the first; I don’t sense a gain in confidence.

To sum up... Stepping out of the front gate dressed, I feel two
contradictory emotions. One is elation – to feel that I’m approximating to what
a ciswoman might experience as she walked down the road in these clothes; the other
is fear – as though I am an undercover agent in disguise, dreading any
encounter with another person in case I am unmasked. If elation is not enough,
is there any force with the power to overcome the fear? Perhaps only a
conviction that I am a t-girl who is finally throwing off her disguise and
appearing as herself – and I’m far from persuaded of that. Increasingly, I am coming to believe that I am
bi-gendered, not mis-gendered. I’ve no wish to live full-time in female role,
and if I did I’d be afflicted by a sense of false entitlement. Born with a male
body, having been raised as male, I can only really know the female from
outside – hence the concentration on appearance and clothes. To claim insight
into anything deeper – their biological processes, for example (what the
reviled Blanchard would call ‘physiologic autogynephilia’) – would be
presumption, when I can have no direct experience of it.

Monday, 20 June 2016

A climacteric approaches. Next month brings a significant
birthday – the sort where everyone slaps you on the back and says things like
‘Don’t worry! Life begins at…’ or ’60 is the new 40’ or ’40 is the new 30’. I
shall celebrate by keeping a long-postponed appointment with a gender identity
specialist. (There may also be cake, but probably not at the same time.) I look
to this guru to tell me, once and for all, am I transgender or am I just a
transvestite who has allowed his hobby to become an obsession?

I have a compulsion to crossdress, but I feel no compulsion
to crossdress in public; I don’t crave public validation in crossdress. I like
the idea of an emergency escape hatch back into ‘normality’; I could not take
an irreversible step (although I may have changed my body beyond reverse now). I
want the specialist to tell me I’m normal; I want him to tell me I’m exceptional.
I want answers to Big Questions.

Although I’ve made friends and vented in cyberspace, so far
all my efforts to take my trans concerns into the real world have met with
little success. I had a couple of sessions with a local therapist, at great
expense, who didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t worked out for myself. I had an
appointment at a laser clinic to see if I could get permanent beard removal.
The employee did a ‘test patch’ on the cheek, causing a brown mark which she
assured me would disappear in 24 hours. It didn’t and hasn’t – which seems to
rule out the laser option for feminisation. I emailed a couple of academics
whose interests appear close to my own; neither bothered to reply.

Any thought of bringing her
into contact with the real world – whether it’s going out ‘dressed’ or just
talking about her face-to-face with someone – seems to diminish her presence, as
if she’s a creature of the shadows, always hiding from sunlight. It’s not just
contact with reality but the mere prospect of such contact seems to drive her
away. Since I made the appointment for next month, she has grown very shy,
perhaps fearing her own extinction. Yet if she is so insubstantial that she
could dissolve at the approach of reality, does she deserve to have any claims
on me at all? I wrote earlier about my reluctance to reveal her ‘true’ name to
anyone else, for fear either that the other person will gain power over her or that she will lose her power over me.

I’m a control freak. That’s why taking my gender concerns to
the next level is problematic. By going public in however small a way and
placing myself in the hands of professionals, I am letting go, unleashing
something I may not be able to control – and it scares me.

At root, I’m acting out the controlled fantasy of being a
young cis-woman. In the private theatre of my own home, if I wear the right
clothes and do all I can to feminise the body underneath, this can be a
convincing virtual-reality simulation. What it is not is a drag act. My assumption is that if I took her outside the
house she wouldn’t survive contact with reality. But if she can’t be sustained
in the world by an act of theatrical improvisation, what then is her power
source? Where does she come from? And where does she go to when she disappears?

Two views of the sculptor’s art: 1. The sculptor looks at a
block of stone and thinks, what can I make out of this? 2. The sculptor sees a
form within the block which is struggling to break free. Which is she?

I used to read a lot of philosophy (but you probably guessed
that already). I was especially drawn to the ‘dualist’ position, as set out by
Descartes, which says there are two separate systems within a human being: a
mental thing, the res cogitans, and a
physical thing, the res extensa. His
concern was how these two systems talk to one another. I doubt this theory
finds much favour nowadays. Talk now is of a feedback loop of reciprocal
influence, mind on body, body on mind, of intelligence ‘distributed’ throughout
our entire body, so that having different bodies means thinking different
thoughts. In their 2007 book How the Body
Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard quote brain
experiments showing that the initiation of a voluntary act is caused by
unconscious neural activity. Counter to what you’d expect, the experience of
conscious will kicks in only after
the brain has started preparing for the action. As Rodney Brooks writes in his
Foreword, ‘this book considers the physical manifestation of the body as
primary. The stuff of intelligence has evolved in conjunction with the body and
is more a modulator of its behaviour rather than a primary control system.’

So one of the major formative influences on mind is the body
it is housed in. The mind doesn’t float free of the body. It was precisely the
ambition to achieve flotation that has made me such a physically unhoused
intellectual. But can I be successfully rehoused in a body that is only a rough
approximation to the one I yearn for and where there has been no opportunity
for the body to form the mind?

Still, once a Cartesian always a Cartesian. I persist in the
belief that I’ve split into two people. All physical sensitivity is
concentrated in her body; every inch of her skin is an erotic pressure-point.
Meanwhile, my male self has consolidated into a disembodied intellectual. It
looks like a case of classic mind-body dualism, except that the two elements
have separated out into discrete organisms. This explains why she and he can’t
coexist in the same space: when she is dominant and he recessive, he can’t do
any of the things that he would normally do, because she doesn’t share those
interests. This is a challenge, for it doesn’t fit either of the scenarios that
are usually held up: either that she is the expression of a ‘truegender’ that
is belatedly breaking through and should be given whatever space she needs to
unfold, or that she can be integrated into my outwardly male form to make an
integrated yet ‘polymorphously perverse’ individual.

A mind housed in an unwanted male body, and a body that
perceives itself as a female work-in-progress but with no thoughts other than
those inspired by the body. A simple but troubling dichotomy: F body without
mind; M mind without body.

These two personae struggle for dominance. One difference
between them is that, although she has certain biographical fixed points (her
age, for example), she doesn’t have a consistent back-story (unlike my male
self). Indeed, I’ve argued that her capacity for self-invention is a source of
her strength. It might be suggested that this is the point where I could stage
a land-grab, take her into myself, allowing her her body while gifting her my
mind. Thus would integration be achieved. There’s no reason why she, a graduate
in English Literature (another fixed point), shouldn’t be seriously interested
in, let’s say, reading Shakespeare in the light of modern preoccupations with
gender. My previous post was a nod in that direction. She could be a ‘hot’
postgraduette; she doesn’t have to be a bluestocking – unless I persist in
maintaining a sexist dichotomy between male intellect and female body-centrism.

To sum up, I am a mind or intellect housed in an unwelcome
male body, and I am an aspiring female body which seems divorced from mind
(although it may possess something of the ‘embodied intelligence’ referred to
above). If she is to go out into the world, I’ll have to engage mind and body: for both to be in lock-step, I
must find her mind. Otherwise, contact with reality may turn out to be the
nuclear option.

Sigh. I wish I had the self-possession and courage of trans activist Sarah McBride:

Tuesday, 8 March 2016

I can’t live without high heels. They may go in and out of
‘fashion’ but for me they are eternal.

Can I share with you Dabrela’s Two Laws? My First Law
states that the higher the heel the more it flatters the leg. The Second Law
qualifies the First by asserting that the higher the heel, the harder it is to
wear. What’s to be done? Well, you have to find a compromise. Go as high as you
can. It has been calculated that the average pair of high heels causes pain
after being worn for 66 minutes and 48 seconds. I’m not sure I can last even
that long. But one tip I offer up for free. Fix on the height you want to wear,
then invest in a pair that is an inch higher. Practise wearing the higher pair
and then when you go back to your shoes of choice – bingo, they feel a lot
easier!

There’s a lot of technique to wearing heels, and I suspect if,
like me, you’re burdened with a male body it’s harder to master. There are
skeletal differences between men and women. It’s a devil to master that
heel-and-toe rolling motion when your heel is a pointed instrument: not for
nothing is the word ‘stiletto’ borrowed from the Italian for ‘dagger’. Anyway,
here’s a video that I found helpful. It warns against three perils – wobbly
ankles, stiff knees and gripping of the thighs – and offers three bits of
advice:

Stand up straight with your chest reaching to the sky. It
will give an impression of confidence and counterbalance the weight-shift.

Engage the lower abs. This activates the lower back, which
is helpful for stabilisation.

Relax through the hips and knees. This helps you ‘glide
through the foot’.

In 2004 a Swedish scientist called Jarl Flensmark published
an academic article suggesting an association between the use of heeled
footwear and schizophrenia. “Heeled footwear,” he wrote, “began to be used more
than 1,000 years ago, and led to the occurrence of the first cases of
schizophrenia ... Industrialisation of shoe production increased schizophrenia
prevalence. Mechanisation of the production started in Massachusetts, spread
from there to England and Germany, and then to the rest of Western Europe. A
remarkable increase in schizophrenia prevalence followed the same pattern.”

It was one of those daft papers that seem concocted
purposely to attract media attention. And sure enough the media picked it up.
You know the sort of thing: “Are Your Shoes Driving You Mad?” The argument was that the wearing of heeled
footwear coincided with the earliest historical reports of schizophrenic
symptoms. Because they are impractical, heels were originally a marker of
class, wealth and sophistication; if you were lucky enough to enjoy those
advantages you were also more likely to report mental ill-health, and many
European princelings and leaders of fashion were clearly off their rockers. Ergo, the elevated footwear drove them
nuts. As Brian Clegg points out in his demolition of Flensmark’s paper, this is
a classic confusion of correlation and causality. If there were a causal link, you might equally argue that the princelings
were mentally unbalanced to begin with and this illness caused them to make
irrational choices, opting for footwear that was anything but sensible.

Lots of theories have been advanced as to why women wear
high heels. It’s often said that heels make their bottoms protrude and wiggle
alluringly from side to side. In his book Curvology:
The Origins and Power of Female Body
Shape, David Bainbridge rejects this on anatomical grounds. He suggests two
other reasons. First, they force a woman to walk slowly and with shorter steps,
thus emphasising two characteristic features of female locomotion (sic). Second, tilting the foot makes it
take up less horizontal space, thus creating the illusion that it is smaller;
and small feet have proved attractive to men across diverse cultures.

Bainbridge’s book is illuminating on many topics but I think
he short-changes us on this issue, even though he recognises that high heels
are “the most common artificial means by which women emphasise their legs”. For
me the fascination of heels is that they combine vulnerability and potency. A
woman in heels can’t run – which means she can’t readily run away. At the same time, they lift her
off the ground, eliminating the typical height difference between men and women,
projecting her aspiringly upwards. I have a theory that many of the things that
hold most power over us do so by combining opposites: they are contradictions
held in dynamic equilibrium. Let me give another example. Why are children –
and indeed adults – mesmerised by dinosaurs? I think it’s because they shimmer
on the frontier between the real and the imagined. They have the
characteristics of fable – dragon-like creatures of unexampled size, strength,
ferocity – yet we know that they once existed, and though we’ll never see one
in a zoo scientists can tell us with increasing accuracy what they looked like
and how they lived. They are a union of opposites.

One of my readers commented that this blog is a bit cerebral and would “go over
a lot of girls’ heads”. Fair comment. Here I am, setting out to celebrate the killer
heel and I end up riffing on dinosaurs! But I suppose the coniunctio oppositorum is actually the key to my own nature: two
spirits in one body, male and female, held for the moment in uneasy
equilibrium. The male me wears sensible brogues. The female me owns far more pairs of
shoes than she can possibly wear, and most of those are ‘statement heels’.